I remember in school we switched from single-portion paper milk cartons to square bags of milk that you punctured with a plastic straw. This was sold to us along with a muppet skit explaining how to use the milk bags (the muppets rated it "one thumb up and one thumb down, to cover the straw hole when you puncture the bag"). There was a poster in the cafeteria comparing the giant pile of milk cartons relative to the small pile of plastic pouches. We paid much more attention to what adults said than they ever gave us credit for, and they had been telling us about renewable and non-renewable resources, about recycling, about landfill space, and about externality. We knew, even if the rational outcome was the same, that it was more than big pile vs small pile.

I remember when bag fees started showing up, and at the checkout grocery stores began selling... reusable plastic bags. People seem to collect these now, maybe 30-40 per household, which is fine by me I'd rather have 40 bags in someone's pantry than 4,000 floating around outside. But it seems excessive. I've accumulated about that many: I on occasion "win a prize", family members bring items over and leave the carrying bags behind, donate money to anyone and you're sure to get a tote. I actually don't have any rope bags though I wish I did, my mother still has hers and she's not parting with them. I think the rope bags are more convenient than anything else, but then what happens to the 40 odd plastic bags I've accumulated?

We always used them as garbage can liners. Now that stores no longer have plastic bags we have to buy plastic bags. So instead of reusing the plastic bags we brought our groceries home in, we are buying brand new plastic bags instead. The same number of plastic bags are entering the landfill. The only difference is that now we have to pay for them.

I think it's more efficient all around to pay for them.

Nitpick: you always had to pay for them, the cost was built in to the purchase price.

I started doing this "before it was cool" back in the 1990s. I wasn't aware of other people doing it so I couldn't understand why they weren't. I learned since then and I still do it today. Why use something once when you can at least use it twice?

a dump truck with a giant mechanical arm grabs my trash can, picks up over the top of the truck, flipping it around in the process, and then shakes it violently.

Where I lived previously, residents brought bags to a warehouse-like building maintained by the town. You dropped your trash through openings in the side of the building that resembled windows. Town employees used tractors equipped with giant claws to scoop up the trash and load it into dumpsters, which were then brought to landfills.

They last practically forever—certainly longer than the cheap reusable bags that have a tendency to tear and stain.

1: http://www.allaboutbags.ca/papervplasticstudies.html.

(Life-cycle analysis does have huge assumptions involving usage, so it's not an exact science)

If a paper bag requires more energy to produce, it could still be better for the environment as it doesn't stay around polluting the world forever.

In my country (Czechia) the contemporary forest cover is about twice as much as in the 18th century and several per cent bigger than in 1950.

The problem is species composition. Those forests are mostly monocultural and prone to devastating disease / pest outbreaks.

Regulation is slowly catching up though, and some of the larger companies have actually started doing more than is required by law.

An ex-coworker of mine has been working with a team on a drone tree-planting startup that is bidding to take on government and heavy industry contracts.

IIRC there are several companies working in that space and surprisingly not more.

Though I suppose that social guilt and pressure is still required to get those heavy industrial corps to want to wear a big green badge boating about all the trees they’ve planted.

So paper was the better choice for the burger, yet plastic was the better choice for your groceries.

I also remember Vons introduced photodegradable bags.(!) They were supposed to alleviate the litter concerns, while also allowing you to save a tree I think? I'm trying to find something online to back this up, but I remember the novelty of it when they first introduced it.

The 'good' news is that the vast majority of plastic waste in the ocean isn't diffuse from around the globe; rather, it is concentrated in a few rivers in asia. The reason for this is that the countries these rivers pass through don't have modern waste collection and landfill infrastructure. It's not exciting to talk about, but this means that helping China, India, and the SE Asian nations build waste management facilities would do more to help the world plastic pollution problem than anything else by orders of magnitude.

(We still need biodegradable plastics. But, much like shale gas being helpful because it decommissions even-worse coal, simple proper waste management will put a huge dent in the problem before the ultimate solution becomes available.)

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Managers hated nothing more than the customer who requested “paper, double bagged”. I think our cost was about 3 cents per paper bag if I recall the training video correctly. Because of generally low margins it really eats into profits.

The misconception is that it sees taxes only as a means of generating revenue to offset the cost or externalities of what’s being taxed.

But taxes are also important in steering behavior. In this case by forcing bags to To be non-free (and not allowing stores to compete by advertising free bags) it incentivizes folks to start bringing their own bag. The revenue is inconsequential.

I agree about steering behavior and I think it should be used more often rather than bans on things.

Since 1630, about 256 million acres of forest land have been converted to other uses—mainly agricultural. Nearly two-thirds of the net conversion to other uses...

It's a land area/land use statement. Clearcut scars in Forest Service land are, more than likely, still considered forest land.

The general fight I remember from the 80's-90's timeframe was over clearcutting old growth, mainly in the Pacific Northwest.

I've heard this a lot of times, but I've never seen any source that claimed the recycled material sent to China gets dumped in the ocean. As I recall, they had paid a small amount of money for it, so it doesn't make sense why they would just throw it away.

I agree that landfills are underrated. It's much more effective to build landfills in poor countries than it is to try to sweep up plastic in the ocean, which may also hurt the environment.

This all happened within eyesight of my condo building.

> it belches smoke into the atmosphere in the middle of a city, has done for a while and nobody seems to suffer any ill effects

How long is a while, and how does that compare to the time it would take to detect meaningful increases in cancer or other illnesses in the vicinity of the incinerator?

Was built in 1995, or so it claims, with other kinds of incineration being done for >100 years.

So 25 years or so. I think that's enough time for a clear effect to show up.

https://phys.org/news/2018-07-trash-piles-china-door-recycli...

China is a major source of ocean plastic, but I doubt it is because of widespread dumping of imported plastic into the ocean.

We really don't have much hope in regulating that.

Western countries can stop sending plastic waste to Asian countries, that would be a start.

Wealth originates in natural resources.

Here you've got bureaucracy, natural resources, value-added product, surplus, scrap, waste, storage, shipping, and business-as-usual being the primary elements interacting overall.

It isn't profitable to send a shipload to a place where it isn't worth more money when it gets there. Price matters.

Propylene gas is one of the fundamentally simplest hydrocarbon monomers, second only to ethylene gas in simplicity.

Used as raw material to produce polypropylene and polyethylene plastics respectively.

Very similar in volatility, flammability, and liquefication properties to propane, propylene can be handled using the same familiar tanks used by consumers for cooking and heating.

And the same traditional LPG vessels or the modern refrigerated lower-pressure types.

We're in a crisis but current prices still represent a somewhat functional market.

Lets put them on the same basis in US dollars and look at the math.

LPG can be considered a crude natural resource and it's quoted in liters across a broad spectrum of prices from 0.07 to 1.16 USD worldwide: -interestingly this data source does not include Mexico or the US, however North America is represented by Canada

https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/lpg_prices/

Propane is refined from LPG, quoted per gallon at 0.46 USD. So that's about 0.12 USD per liter for comparison to the LPG spectrum:

https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=propane

Propylene is produced using propane as the raw material, quoted per metric tonne at about 870 USD, except on the US Gulf Coast where delivery without shipping is only about 20 USD per tonne. So that's about 0.53 USD per liter elsewhere for comparison to the LPG spectrum:

https://www.fibre2fashion.com/market-intelligence/textile-ma...

Quite a bit of certain value added here in the step from propane to propylene but some people are still paying more for hydrocarbons to burn than others are paying for raw monomers for polymerization into plastic.

And they all come in the same vessels when available.

Made from the propylene monomer as raw material, solid plastic bulk polypropylene pellets on the same basis at 1170 USD per tonne can be seen to provide notable multiples of value added on the US Gulf Coast. For the pellets that's a price about 0.72+ USD per liter of equivalent propylene monomer (ideally polymerized) to compare to LPG:

https://www.fibre2fashion.com/market-intelligence/textile-ma...

Note that both charts from the last data source appear to have European prices quoted in Euros on an otherwise US dollar chart, so things are even more expensive over there than it looks.

And the virgin polypropylene or polyethylene pellets might be under consideration to be shipped by the same solid-cargo vessels in competition with more diffucult-to-handle waste plastic.

Actually if an overseas factory uses a liter equivalent of cheap plastic pellets to make consumable items for return export, their value added can be a bigger multiple than any of the preceeding members of the value-added chain. Like a few dollars rather than these sub-dollar amounts.

Even within the same oil company, different degrees of environmental protection can be accomplished by different groups.

Different incentives apply to different groups of bonus-seekers, the exploration, production, refining, petrochemicals, and polymers each have their own not-fully-aligned efforts.

Sometimes bonuses can only be had by the most agressive growth operators at all costs, externalized or not.

Then there's this from 2013: HN link to: One of the largest polypropylene production facilities opens in Siberia [2013] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458335

And since that's not enough for consumers, now there's this from Thursday: HN link to: Launch of New World Class Polypropylene Production Line in La Porte, Texas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458348

Remember, some businesspeople will never be satisfied unless every dollar is greedily extracted at each possible point in a chain, often preferring it to be done to someone else's extreme disadvantage if possible.

To be financially sustainable;

It takes a lot of surplus to save from destruction, distribute, deploy, repair and/or reuse.

It takes a whole lot more scrap to recover the valuable components from.

You can only imagine how much tonnage it would take once there are no more financially valuable components.

Now both the surplus & scrap have always been under pressure from virgin raw materials and manufacturing to begin with, and so surplus & scrap are still often included with and regarded as _waste_. Some people hate anything old anyway. Actually makes the waste seem to be more valuable if it's not just plain plastic too.

There's not supposed to be any level of imagination that can conceive of a scale so vast that handling plain plastic waste would be financially feasible.

So the waste doesn't have a chance, there's fundamentally not a promising financial market that can develop around a liability.

Unless maybe you promise to do something but you don't actually do it.

The only market can be among those willing to pay to discharge a liability.

A big city, company, or community can easily attach no remaining value to more dumpster loads of stuff the more wasteful and consumer-oriented the society.

It can't be economically handled, stored or shipped, and the more of these efforts that are incurred they increase the depth of the liability, so the incentive can arise to make it the sooner the discharge the better.

When the only remaining real value is as scrap for recycling or fuel for energy recovery, but both are uneconomical compared to virgin material, the final incentive falls to incidental accumulators whose economics are not quite prohibitive, but on too small a scale to make a major impact, or on a too-imaginative scale of accumulation which often fails to have a positive outcome.

Surplus, scrap, and waste operators have always had their warehouses, scrapyards, and dumps under pressure to discharge at the same average rate as accumulation. Lots of them are always _almost_ full.

Seems to me once an overseas business like this is established, there will be times when it will make economic sense for someone to discharge a low-value cargo into the ocean even if they were to continue the voyage all the way to the intended recycling port afterward. If the receiving dump was still anticipated to be full upon the vessel's ETA, the cargo could not be accepted anyway, and a procedure could be developed to handle it with creative paperwork, even routinely without any changes to established office systems. So everyone continues to make money because they're being paid to get rid of the waste, not because someone actually thinks they can add value to the waste if delivered. Maybe extract a little more value, but not add anything, and further value removal can be a costly maybe still leaving most of the bulk left over anyway, and there may be _greener_ pastures.

When there's no market to rescue a marginal asset which quickly turns into a vast liability during a voyage, there can be no rescue to hold out for.

Fundamentally a shipload of waste is worth less than a shipload of crude oil except for a few days each century wben crude goes below zero. The rest of the time crude oil is higher, sometimes fluctuating wildly while still providing a cheaper source of virgin plastic than recycled plastic can compete with. Waste plastic never rises significantly above zero, and is always on the decline.

There could be incentive to ocean dump just because the asset is so marginal, to prevent further cost of handling and storage, and eliminate risk of turning into a liability through time. Actually voyaging nowhere near an overseas port. Covering this with paperwork could be the most profitable business niche in the declining-value chain. Mountains of garbage might have more slippery slopes than you think, and people end up under the table. Returning an unburnt fraction of the vast produced resource to the earth offshore to where much of it originated, but not to the subsurface. In a value-extracted-while-declining way comparable to just spilling the oil intentionally.

Similar to the way at the other end a pipeline thief might make more money per barrel than the oil company would from the oil they are stealing as it comes from the earth.

I don't know if anyone seriously insures these waste cargoes against losses to begin with.

>Here you've got bureaucracy, natural resources, value-added product, surplus, scrap, waste, storage, shipping, and business-as-usual being the primary elements interacting overall.

Same elements as the Beirut explosion where the impact may or may not be as large on the environment as many shiploads of waste plastic, but after a period of complacency both raise their ugly head in their own way. In Beirut that was just one shipment and the human failures had an instantaneously undeniable effect after the delay.

Shipments which are of marginal value don't have a mainstream re-entry point because they compete with shipments having full value.

It wouldn't be so bad without all the dishonesty & greed.

I really hope it wasn’t dumped into the ocean :(

The message is and has been "reduce, reuse, recycle." Recycling has been sold from the very beginning as being the option of last resort.

Even though recycling is supposed to be the last resort, it was treated as an effective solution on its own instead. Less attention was paid to "reduce" and "reuse" and most of the attention was focused on "recycle"

If people had to recycle for real it would be more challenging and then reduce and reuse would be considered more often.

Maybe in the most literal reading of that slogan, but a claim like this could really use some substantiation.

Realistically, it probably makes sense to reuse plastic waste as fuel, if it's not economical to recycle it. But burning plastic is frowned upon.

If it's the one I remember, resolving the words of the next line was surprisingly ambiguous, with the two popular options being "...and close the loop" or "...and don't pollute"

I believe I produce very little waste, and put my rubbish and recycling bins out for collection every few months, rather than every two weeks, but I find it hard to see how I could get from where I am to what you describe.

I can get lentils, rice, bread, maybe milk etc without packaging (Unverpackt-Läden in Germany) but not butter, eggs, cheese, spices and so on.

on producers AND consumers. They're not exclusive. Producers have deceived, but consumers have been all too happy to suspend skepticism when buying things once the producer puts the word "recycle" on it somewhere. Consumers overwhelmingly skip the reduce part. Everyone I talk to about it, when they drop their defenses, says somewhere inside they knew they were participating but wanted to believe recycling was more benign than they knew it was. They just wanted their latte without thinking about it too much.

I'm not removing responsibility from producers or government. Consumers have a lot of power. Single-use plastic at least isn't hard to avoid with practice, at least to drop 90 percent of it. Just avoiding packaged food, with a few years practice the last I emptied my garbage was December and I expect my next emptying in 2022.

I’m fairly sure I’m in the top 10% of giving a f in my country. Culture has huge impact so I don’t want to discourage individual action, but this won’t change until conservation becomes the default.

This post explains more: https://joshuaspodek.com/emptying-my-household-garbage-for-t...

That said, I read someone write about soy milk makers and did my usual practice of checking Craig's List until I saw someone selling one for $15. I make a batch or two a week from dried bulk soybeans.

For food, note that a few years ago I never cooked from scratch and ate out maybe five nights a week, so all that follows I learned by doing.

I buy what's in season at the farmers market, what the CSA delivers, and from the bulk section. I buy from the same farmers so we've become friendly and they give me a lot of free vegetables -- the ugly ones they take back to compost or the greens others decline when they buy beets or radishes and don't know they're edible. My impression is that my variety has gone up since I'm always buying something that hasn't been in season for ten months, but my friends probably think it's gone down since I make my famous no-packaging vegetable stews https://joshuaspodek.com/food-world-reviews so much.

I rarely eat out of season or non-local foods at home. In the winter after the last cabbages, that means a lot of beets, parsnips, rutabagas, sweet potatoes, etc. I'm fermenting more and started sprouting dried beans, which should increase my greens in the winter.

Frankly, I've never eaten more delicious, while saving money and connecting with farmers, friends, and family more. What started as trying to pollute less ended up giving a lot more than I expected.

This is tangential but brings me to something I find hilarious.

Farmers here don’t tend to give those vegetables away to anyone. They repackage them and bring them to the farmers markets in the city and market the hell out of the whole “farm to table/rustic” thing.

I’m from the townships a lot of the stalls I see here (Toronto) come from.

My partner fell for it once and I rudely laughed at her (I’ve apologized!). She went out to one of the local markets and picked up what was a ...rustic... looking and misshapen long bell pepper. Taking one look at the thin-walled, Unripe green/ruddy thing I just sort of blurted. I explained to her why they’d bring that stuff up to the city on their weekend stall day along with their other goods.

We cut it up and tried it. It was horrible. It was bitter and somehow hard even though the fruit was only about 3mm thick.

And I still find it funny because I know those families and their produce is amazing. We go to one of their shops whenever I visit my family and load up.

Waste not want not, eh?

You can purchase them with non-plastic packaging (glass particularly; cardboard cartons use plastic liners.)

In the US at least, cities can also get creative, such as exempting compostable items from sales taxes.